''We suffer more in imagination than we do in reality''
-Seneca
Here's one thing that I heard from a friend lately while we were having casual tea time;
"My mind is so confused and heavy. I literally can't stop wasting my time thinking about random stuff. I stop myself when I realize it, but sometimes it takes me a long time to realize it. This thing has now turned into an autonomous thing, like breathing and blinking. I don't know how to stop this zoning out sessions. What would you do in this situation? Do you have any advice?"
My number one advice to people suffering from this problem is to take care of some basic things. For example, problems such as insomnia, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, social isolation, and screen addiction. Those things can cause your awareness to be low and your focus to be scattered.
My second advice is, don't let nonsense go around in your head. Either try to solve them fast or write down everything that has a solution in real life, from the easiest to the most difficult ones. When you have a lot of to-dos, most of which are relatively unimportant, this a lot to-dos can run around like mobile apps running in the background of the phone. Even if they are unimportant things, when you solve them, you close a thought loop in your mind. Therefore you're saving some random access memory (RAM) in your mind and saving some idle energy in your mind.
For example, have you kept in mind that you will make a payment in 3 days?
Have you kept in your mind instead of recording it as a reminder on the phone or writing it as a note on the refrigerator?
If you say yes, in this case, it is a thing constantly occupies a small part of your thoughts, leaning your mind towards being drowned in thoughts, at least a little.
Or, if you need to have the leaking tap in your bathrom repaired but you keep postponing it, the thought and worry of "get the tap repaired, I hope it won't be too expensive" thought lives in your mind, eating memory and processor.
Just like an application running in the background on your phone. When you pay the repair fee and set a date for the the repair, that background program closes itself. Therefore it doesn't set you back from other things you can use your brain energy.
People who live inside their minds, because they live less in the real world, they often have a lot of such tiny little daemons, each one of them taking up very little space in their head and therefore taking up a lot of space in total. That's being said, my advice to you is that no matter what your real big problems are in your mind (financial situation, your education path, daily wories, etc.), solving these unimportant things, from the easiest to the most difficult one. Trust me, this will significantly reduce the time you get lost in your thoughts.
The interesting thing is that even though the program that you have been running in the background for months saying "you should start going to gym, lets do it" has nothing to do with your big problems such as being late in life, closing such a bunch of programs by taking action in real life is a big step towards solving your problem of being late in life.
Because it will free up a significant amount of mental energy, but more importantly, because doing those little things will force you to be more present in the here and now every day.
By the way, this is exactly what it means when they generally say tidy up your room. The reason why they say this is because every mess in your room works as a small worry program in the background of your mind and drains your mental energy. The unorganized notes on your desk, the clothes scattered here and there, the squeaky closet door, the unpaid bill live not only in your home but also in your head.
These are things that almost all of you will benefit from and are much more important and transformative than you think. But even if you do these, many of you will continue to be trapped in the world of thought.
Here we come to an observation about the situation of the person I mentioned in the beginning. Someone who listens to broadcasts like the 25-year-old man drowning in his thoughts usually perceives this as an on-off switch or something like turning the radio's volume up or down.
What is this friend says: “I can't stop my thoughts.”
Now, unless you have a goal of reaching nirvana and saying hello to the god, you do not need to stop your thoughts, so this friend actually wants his awareness to be at a sufficient level, at the same level of control as a normal person.
Getting the awareness of a man who has been drowning in his thoughts for years to come under sufficient control is like a man who has been paralyzed in bed for many years suddenly wants to do 100 kilos of squats suddenly. As you can imagine it won't happen immediately. Like a magic wand touching him. His general capacity is not ready for such a heavy task.
The "muscles" that control where such a person's awareness had atrophic. It has melted away becuse of not being used. However by trying to control it for 5-10 minutes every day, just like a rehab, and gradually extending this time, the person will subject those muscles to resistance and the "muscles" will gradulaly develop.
Of course, awareness does not have muscles, but the person must try to control his awareness. When we talk about the confused man, his brain circuits have faded away, he must rebuild them to get back on the track.
In our example case the doctor says to their patient, "You should be able to squat 100 kilos." Then the patient also says that "I can't even get out of bed, what do you mean 100 kilos of squat pressing?
As you can imagine, the doctor doesn't mean to the patient to get up and do it with 100 kilos right away, the doctor says first get the rehabilitation of your muscles and then go on from 10 kilos to 100 kilos, from the smaller weight to the larger one, over the course of months. STEP BY STEP.
Today, you resist for 5 minutes and then weaken. Then gradually increase it for 10 minutes, 20 minutes. During this process and the rest of it, your mind is still a mess, but at least there is some control and control is increasing inside your mind slowly. This is how it exactly works. This is also how meditation works. Distract - gather attention, bring your awareness to your breath from where you are constantly running away, lower the weight - raise the weight for the muscles, it is what it is. Meditation is not a concentration exercise. It is an exercise of losing focus – gaining focus.
Why I am saying this, because you don't lift weights and hold them up in the air for 1 minute at the gym. You lift and lower it. Weight lifting exercise and it is actually the exercise of lifting and lowering weights. Meditation is exactly like that. Constantly losing focus is part of the process, not the failure.
I advice some of my website followers a Gestalt Approach-based exercise that they can use on this subject, and they find it very useful.
As soon as you realize you are lost in your thoughts, begin to describe what is happening outside, in the here and now. “Today is May 25, 5:15 in the evening. Cloudy. I'm sitting in the park, my laptop is 30% charged. In front of me is an uncle in his 60s, telling something passionately to an aunt of the same age. A red car is parked outside. A man with a mustache stands next to him…”
Explain these to yourself one by one. Simple and simple things. Sometimes your mind will wander to thoughts again. Once you realize this, take it from there and start describing again. The longer you do it, the better.
One of the most important steps is to take real-world action to stop thought loops. Eventually you will need to take action on big problems, but don't forget these little things, too. These are much more important than you think.
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